sist the lesser number of
claimants. For the routine work of the office an extremely simple
system of records with card index, &c., has been devised. In some
cities, particularly in the United States of America, there is a
central registration of cases, notified by individual charities,
poor-relief authorities and private persons. The system of charity
organization or associated charity, it will be seen, allows of the
utmost variety of treatment, according to the difficulties in each
instance and the remedies available, and the utmost scope for personal
work. (3) _Training._--If charitable work is an art, those who
undertake it must needs be trained both in practice and method and in
judgment. It requires, too, that self-discipline which blends
intelligence with emotion, and so endows emotion with strength and
purpose. In times of distress a reserve of trained workers is of the
utmost service. At all times they do more and produce, socially,
better results; but when there is general distress of any kind they do
not lose their heads like new recruits, but prevent at least some of
the mischief that comes of the panic which often takes possession of a
community, when distress is apprehended, and leads to the wildest
distribution of relief. Also trained workers make the most useful
poor-law guardians, trustees of charities, secretaries of charitable
societies and district visitors. All clergy and ministers and all
medical men who have to be engaged in the administration of medical
relief should learn the art of charity. Poor-law guardians are
usually elected on political or general grounds, and have no special
knowledge of good methods of charity; and trustees are seldom
appointed on the score of their qualifications on this head. To
provide the necessary education in charity there should be competent
helpers and teachers at charity organization committees and elsewhere,
and an alliance for this purpose should be formed between them and
professors and teachers of moral science and economics and the
"settlements." Those who study social problems in connexion with what
a doctor would call "cases" or "practice" see the limits and the
falsity of schemes that on paper seem logical enough. This puts a
check on the influence of scheme-building and that literary
sensationalism which makes capital out of social conditions. (4)
_Co-operation._--Organization in cha